It is known that management of the flight path of an aircraft is generally left under the control of an onboard flight management system. Modification of a flight plan, in particular, is often a complicated procedure, necessitating multiple interactions with systems of the aircraft, the final result of which is not totally optimized. This is notably due, on the one hand, to the difficulties and limitations inherent in the use of published routes and procedures and, on the other hand, to the limitations of the already existing functions for generating non-published flight paths (for example “DIR TO”).
The document FR 2 968 441 describes a method and a device making it possible to determine an optimum flight path followed by an aircraft. It proposes an algorithm for generating optimized flight paths in real time, which can be installed onboard an aircraft, which produces flight paths which can be flown in dynamic environments. It depends on a discretization of the space around the aircraft, based on the elements used by the flight management system (FMS, standing for “Flight Management System” in English) and heuristics computed on the basis of the direct distance to the joining point which is the point to be reached by the flight path. It also prioritizes, via the heuristics, the solutions which minimize the heading deviations with respect to the direct flight path of the aircraft to the joining point. However, the algorithm used does not take account of the location, nor of the geometry of the obstacles in order to anticipate the collisions with the environment. It generates new candidate positions in each iteration and checks a posteriori that these positions are admissible with respect to environmental constraints such as the absence of collision between the flight path making it possible to join this new position and the obstacles. The algorithm therefore goes straight to the joining point until it meets an obstacle, then it goes back in order to go around that obstacle by trying other directions. The method of the algorithm has the feature of being rather robust with regard to the different possible configurations but it sometimes results in a long and unacceptable computing time of an onboard function because the absence of anticipation causes, uselessly with regard to the algorithm, the computation of a large number of positions at each step which result in positions that are inadmissible to the following steps.
The solution proposed by the document FR 2 968 441 could be optimized.